DIY science is the perfect way to use your creative skills and learn something new. With the right supplies, some determination, and a curious mind, you can create amazing experiments that open up a whole world of possibilities. At home-made laboratories or tech workshops, makers from all backgrounds can explore new ideas by finding ways to study their environment in novel ways – allowing them to make breathtaking discoveries!
Imagine a regular tetrahedron. Mark the midpoint of one edge and draw straight lines to the vertices opposite that edge on the two faces incident to that edge. In your mental image, transmogrify that edge and those two lines into zippers and unzip them. What do you get? Believe it or not, a standard American-size business card.
Mathemusician Vi Hart, never one to rest on convention, decides that “linear bird stuffing,” a la the turkducken, is not very inspired and sets herself the task of creating a more fractal-friendly “turduckenen-duckenen” (or, um something like that).
Simon Park’s textile designs are created with social and antisocial bacteria. These are examples from a series of works featuring purely biogenic designs, which explore the inherent creativity of, and which use nature, to directly generate textile designs. Physarum polycephalum is an intriguing and striking microorganism that exhibits simple “intelligence”. In this respect, it will […]
A user asks what the difference is between normal and archival paper.
Built using simple materials like bamboo and biodegradable plastic, Massoud Hassani’s Mine Kafons are kinetic sculptures that save lives. Carried by the wind, the tumbling dandelion-shaped orbs cover large swaths of land scattered with abandoned land mines. As the plastic pads that cover its outer surface detonates the ordnance, the device absorbs the impact of the blast with minimal damage.
Michael Ciuffo of Ch00ftech built this tiny persistence-of-vision (POV) display, based on an Attiny24, to fit on his longboard’s 72mm wheels.
Today’s column is devoted to truncated icosahedron constructions and the nerds who love.
